22.5

I stared at Melvin as he fiddled with different buttons and knobs on my AE-1. His hair was locked in a mass of long, thin dreds that hung past his waist like little snakes. The roots were gray, but the color gradually got darker and deeper as it wound down the length of each lock, ending a dark brown at the tips. His hair kept the record of his years and marked the passing of time, retaining in its strands the visual progression from youth to age.

"The digital age," he muttered, absently shaking his head as he examined the interior of the body. He took a bottle of anti-dust and sprayed it into the camera. "It's all this generation knows. That's why they call me up here when someone brings one of these old ones in. I am the only one in here that knows about the old-school manuals anymore."

He set the camera down and popped the battery out of its terminal. Replacing the battery, he reattached the lens the previous attendant had been unable to put back on the camera. "This lens had a bayonet ring base," he said. "the lens, therefore, is mounted by lining up the red dot of the body to the red dot of the bayonet ring, turning the ring clockwise and pressing it gently until it locks into position-"

he twisted the bayonet ring slowly until the the lens hooks clicked into the grooves on the body.

"-like so." Melvin held the camera up and took several test shots. The camera, which had previously been stalling and failing to take pictures when I pressed the button, now snapped strongly with each of Melvin's air snapshots.

"What was wrong with it?" I asked.

"Nothing," Melvin said. "The battery just needed to be replaced."

I sighed in relief. "Other than that, what condition is it in?"

"Apart from the interior foam needing to be replaced, it's in excellent condition," he said, flipping the camera around in his hands. "The camera looks as though it has been in storage for years. It has been used, but thankfully, not misused."

He handed the camera back to me. "This camera is the best model Canon ever made," he said. "Despite being older than you are, the AE-1 was the digital camera of its time."

"Yeah, well I was thinking about getting a digital too," I said. "Just because it allows me to immediately see the types of photos I'm taking. At least until I know what I am doing."

"Learn both," Melvin said. "You have to."

"Even though I am only twenty-four," I said, "the extent and complexity of modern technology makes me feel old. My kids have so many advanced forms of video games, media players and communication gadgets, I am lost half the time when they try to explain what they did with some thingy-thing to somebody else's thingy-thing. Personally, I think it would be great to start a photography class at my school, just to expose kids to the most traditional visual medium."

"Ah yes, 'ghetto' kids," Melvin said with a smile. "They are by far, the most creative visual artists I have come across in my life. I would love to get back into teaching photography to urban youth. The amazing quality of kids in the inner city is that they have a unique way of seeing the world and understanding who they are in that world. Those very kids who have a creative, innovative outlook, however, are the same kids that can become problems for everybody else."

"Well yes," I said. "My most behaviorally challenged students are among the smartest and most perceptive that I teach."

"Exactly," Melvin said. "The key is to help them channel that. It's important that black kids begin to understand the power of visual media, as its own power of influence and as it exists alongside the written word. The combined force of the two shapes nations, histories and societies. Kids today don't know how influential the visual media is on them. They just take images in and take them in and take them in without processing them or being aware of the subliminal effects."

"I know," I said. "I am a writer, and I agree that the combined forces of both mediums can be enlightening and restorative or deadly and destructive. I drive by billboards daily featuring advertisements for 'Grand Theft Auto IV' and witness the biggest challenge to my classroom."

"What many people don't know is that Hitler's power during World War II was not in the strength of the Nazis or the Luftwaffe," Melvin said. "The power was in the propaganda. The propaganda he circulated was more powerful than any manpower he could have mobilized. The media made the people believe what Nazi Germany wanted them to believe."

"As did the Black Codes, Jim Crow, minstrel shows, lynchings, old cartoons and buffoonery posters white American society circulated against blacks," I added. "Visual media shapes social consciousness. It's terrifying if that social consciousness is founded on a series of exaggerations and lies. It lends itself to a perception of reality that doesn't exist. In the case of America, that reality has white people, as a collective, believing themselves better than everyone else and black people, as a collective, believing that they are less than everyone else. It's entitlement versus disinheritance. With this in mind, if I can somehow find a way to get my kids to read and listen and watch actively instead of passively, then I can begin to show them how to de-construct systems of influence and, where necessary, re-envision and recreate them."

"Well," Melvin said, "Give me a call if you want to start a photo club at your school."

"Oh yay," I said. "Absolutely."

"And keep working with that camera," he said. "That's a sturdy little thing you have there."

* * *

When people ask me how I feel as a teacher, I picture myself standing on a hot shore near the ocean, holding a styrofoam cup. The cup is chewed around the brim and has holes punctured in the sides and on the bottom. With this raggedy cup, I busily transport water from the deep, blue endlessness to a huge silo-like structure far away in the distance. No matter how fast I run (and I run pretty fast), the water leaks out onto the sand and evaporates without a trace. By the time I reach the silo, my cup is empty save the three or four water molecules that accidentally got stuck in the cup's interior ridge. And so I run back, trying again and again, trying to run faster and faster. When that doesn't work, I try holding the cup more tightly, plugging two of the fifty holes with my pinky and thumb, somehow trying to compensate for the frailty of the cup that magnifies the impracticality of the task.

A year goes by and then another year goes by, and I grow wearier, and wearier. And when I finally pause to look at my work, I find myself staring at three teaspoons of water in the hollow, resounding silo. I look back on my trail and see no evidence of the thousands of gallons I lost on the way that have now disappeared. At one point, I had them - I carried each drop of water. And at one point each of those drops slipped through a hole, fell and vanished.

The feeling of incompetence is overwhelming.

I believe in the power of my classroom. I believe in it for the hour and a half that I see my kids every day. What I cannot fight, however, is the influence of 22.5 hours beyond my reach. The likelihood that the 1.5 hours with me will somehow outweigh the time that they are subject to the worlds they inhabit, many of them bad, is slim. It could happen, in some cases. In many cases, however, those external worlds are at odds with the world of my classroom. For my kids, that very contention goes as far as to trivialize the world I occupy.

If I think about this long enough I will go mad, so I try not to. Instead, I write.